Comment Re:Bring back copyright renewal (Score 1) 331
I like your idea, but Congress won't enact it because the government gets the money anyway.
The zeitgeist is that in the post-industrial age, protecting the interests of the large-scale copyright holders is in the best interest of the US economy. Microsoft, Disney, and countless smaller companies like them bring a metric buttload of cash into the economy; revenues that will become even more important as more and more manufacturing moves to China. Our government is funded by the taxes paid by US-based copyright holders.
If the US starts taxing copyrights themselves, that's simply less profit to tax at the end of the year.
I'm perhaps presenting an overly simplistic view of corporate tax, but it's clear that when it comes to how copyright holders are treated, the average Slashdotter and the US governments are at the ends of the spectrum. Your typical slashdotter would like to see companies who make excessive revenues on copyrighted works to be punished; perhaps even to be made extinct. Yet these same companies are our government's lifeblood.